BJ Shea

BJ Shea

BJ'S BLOG 08/05/13 "Learning New Things"

by BJ Shea,posted Aug 5 2013 6:37AM

Today's blog comes from one of my mentors, Dan Sanders:

Every week, we learn something new, something we had never known before. Sometimes it's funny, sometimes something sad, or interesting. And hopefully something that somehow affects us in an overall positive way.

Unfortunately, we sometimes learn and see things, we wish we had not. My question is: once we know there has been an evil created, a mass murderer, land mines exploding in war zones, suicide bombers, and a never-ending string of the most atrocious scenes imaginable. Once we have seen this relating to the same story, why does media keep showing us the same scenes over and over again ? The reason they keep showing us is because we keep watching it. Why do we keep watching the same gory pictures over and over? Maybe it's detachment. It’s almost like another movie or computer game. "Wow! Dude look another zombie just got their heads blown into hamburger" That is, until it hits home and the detachments end; it hits nearby, and not some place miles and miles away. There is a “grave” difference between seeing pictures of the Boston Marathon bombings. And seeing what happened on TV and standing maybe five blocks or two blocks or directly in front of the exploding pressure cooker. We see too many of those same stories and I do mean the “same” stories run over and over. And not enough of (silly as they are) like the stories below.

I liked the recent story about Simon Cowell. The headlines read "He’s’ Going To Have A Baby" I guess that’s almost as interesting as, "Simon Cowell Got His Best Friend’s Wife Pregnant". By the way, I get the byline on that one. I’m also wondering if Simon and his best friend look alike, if so, why tell?

I also found out this week that Superman may be Jewish. I’m not going to run the list here but here is a fascinating link. http://www.forward.com/articles/178454 . It makes a lot of sense, especially the first two reasons given. Here is a quote from part of the first reason “ Superman’s creator, Jerry Siegel, acknowledges in an unpublished memoir that he was strongly influenced by anti-Semitism he saw and felt, and that Samson was a role model for Superman.” So this week I had it reinforced that evil is ugly. Over and over again I was told that.

But! The good news is. It doesn’t matter who really saves the world from evil, Christen, Jew, or great white buffalo, as long as it gets saved. By the way, with 21 million grossing on opening days "The Man Of Steel" could spread the wealth and really help the world. The other thing I learned this week is that Simon Cowell is really superman.